Cryptocurrency Is A Hideous Monstrosity Made Out Of Computers And Greed That Is About To Devour The World

The prophecies of The Oracle Of Tulips are about to be realized.

In the early summer of 2022 I encountered a simple bar chart that caused me great consternation. The chart purported to show in rather stark terms that somehow not only was the cryptocurrency industry making massive political donations, it was actually donating more money to American politicians than the tech industry, the pharma industry, the defense industry¹… or even the pharma industry combined with either of the other two. This is that chart:

The vast majority of crypto’s political donations were made with money Sam Bankman-Fried stole from his customers at FTX.

At the time I saw the chart I had not paid any attention to crypto since that accursed industry’s second wave, the ICO mania of 2015-2016. Not that I had actually paid all that much attention then either. Aside from a day or two I spent doing a technical assessment of The Bitcoin Fork Wars for a friend who owned some bitcoins but didn’t have the requisite technical skills to do that kind of thing on their own² I hadn’t thought much about it. I will say, however, that after I finished catching up on the state of the art in blockchain technology in 2016 I quite clearly remember trying to reason my way to a world where bitcoin would have real utility and therefore real value. I came up empty, as had so many people with actual technical and/or mathematical training before me³.

In a way I was correct - bitcoin’s actual undeniable utility is pretty much limited to crime⁴. But I was wrong about the value part of the equation. I failed to factor in the incredible power of human stupidity, especially when that stupidity is turbocharged by greed and mass psychosis. Even as a lifelong fan of Charles' Mackay’s classic Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds⁵ I completely failed to see that the same dark forces that have haunted financial markets since John Law’s Mississippi scheme single-handedly crashed the entire European economy for a generation would propel the cryptocurrency bubble to absurd heights even as one industry titan after another turned out to be nothing more than a multi-billion dollar crime scene. Terra/Luna (~$20-40 billion). OneCoin (~$10 billion). FTX (~$8 billion). Genesis Global (~$4 billion). Voyager (~$4 billion). Celsius Network (~$3 billion). 3AC (~$3 billion). BitConnect (~$3 billion). QuadrigaCX, Thodex, PlusToken, WoToken, AfriCrypt, Gemini Earn, and SafeMoon (all $1-2 billion dollar frauds). And that’s just an incomplete list of the crypto scams that stole more than a billion dollars (most crypto frauds only aspire to billionaire status). Yet somehow the fact that the vast majority of crypto companies turned out to be scams run by the absolute dregs of humanity proved inconsequential when set against the desire of human beings to believe in absurd get rich quick schemes⁶.

Everyone hates rules and regulations until it's too late. The fantasyland idea of software protocols and algorithms and communities policing themselves flies in the face of 500 years of financial market history. Digital money is still money and people are insane. That doesn't change, no matter what kind of investment we're talking about. Free markets were born in a time where you could not safely drink water so everyone drank alcohol all day long, out of cups made of lead. This is Europe in the 1500's. We were crazy then and we are crazy now.

- Joshua M Brown, “Chaos Is A Ladder”

Anyways around the time I saw the data on crypto’s massive political donations I started checking in on Molly White’s incredible Web3 Is Going Just Great occasionally. The site (blog?) collates a simple and factual timeline of the various financial catastrophes that make up the ongoing tidal wave of fraud and cringe that is the cryptocurrency industry, ranging from hacks of individual monkey JPEG collectors (“all my apes gone”) all the way up to the collapse of decabillion dollar companies backed by Silicon Valley’s “best and brightest” like FTX and Genesis Global.

Not to get too “woo woo” about it but after a few weeks of reading Web3 Is Going Just Great, armed with the glimpse under the hood provided by the chart of crypto’s political largesse, I had what I can only describe as a Vision. Cryptocurrency, it seemed to me, was on the verge of harnessing the unstoppable power of human greed to set the wealth of humanity on fire in the globe’s first truly global economic mania. If that were allowed to come to pass not only would it result in an absolutely incredible transfer of wealth from the global citizenry into the hands of scammers, but the inevitable eventual collapse would cause such widespread suffering that it would topple the international rules based world order and usher in a new dark age of extreme inequality and cruelty. While the exact contours of this future were a bit vague one thing was clear: cryptocurrency was the most serious threat to civilization currently on offer. And not only was no one picking up on the threat, journalists all over the world were falling all over each other in their rush to debase themselves in service of this demonic force. So I did what one does when faced with the collapse of the world’s governments into tech fascism and criminality: I signed up for an account on The Privatized Public Square⁷.

That all sounds pretty melodramatic so maybe it’s easier to just summarize the evolution of my views on cryptocurrency over the years in a three point bulleted list:

• 2012: Cryptocurrency is funny.

• 2016: Cryptocurrency is annoying⁸.

• 2022: Cryptocurrency is a hideous monstrosity made out of computers and greed that must be destroyed before it devours the world.

As a result of this dystopian vision I ended up writing an essay, fittingly titled Cryptocurrency Is A Hideous Monstrosity Made Out Of Computers And Greed That Must Be Destroyed Before It Devours The World. Perhaps because of the punchy title and perhaps because of the timing of its publication (in the summer of 2022 after the Terra/Luna collapse but before shit really hit the fan in the rest of the crypto economy) it ended up being surprisingly widely read, showing up in weird places like NPR broadcaster’s blogs and in the tweets of popular posters on The Privatized Public Square. Among other things I correctly called out Sam Bankman-Fried and FTX for running the world’s most obvious fraud⁹ two months before The New Yorker magazine ran a glowing profile of the philanthropic intentions of the guy then trying to buy the American election with organized crime money in the first test run of our current political reality.

Unfortunately, however, today that essay languishes in my old Medium account where it is annoyingly paywalled¹⁰. Now that the cryptocurrency industry has successfully installed Donald Trump as the leader of the free world and pretty much bought the entire American Congress (the industry was responsible for half of all corporate PAC money spent in the election and every single one of the 48 congressional candidates the industry supported won) and placed the United States firmly on the road to kleptocracy I figured it was worth republishing it on this site where it can be more easily read. Especially considering that those same congresspeople are already drafting legislation to transfer most of a trillion dollars of taxpayer money into the hands of crypto bros (if we get lucky) or default on America’s national debt and collapse the global economy with hyperinflation so as to replace the U.S. dollar with bitcoin (if we get unlucky). And if you think that last part sounds like hyperbole you haven’t been paying attention to what the members of The Nerd Reich have been saying very publicly for years now.

So here it is, very lightly edited.

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Cryptocurrency Is A Hideous Monstrosity Made Out Of Computers And Greed That Must Be Destroyed Before It Devours The World, Part I

June 14th, 2022

“Men, it has been well said, think in herds; it will be seen that they go mad in herds, while they only recover their senses slowly, and one by one.”

- Charles MacKay, Extraordinary Popular Delusions & the Madness of Crowds

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Last night a Twitter account that I did not recognize asked me to interpret a bitcoin price chart for them. Doing so took me down a long, dark, and disorienting road. I strolled through databases, pawed through exchange data, and browsed the blockchain. Eventually it dawned on me:

1. Cryptocurrencies have created a trillion dollar economic sector built entirely around the exploitation of carefully engineered gambling addictions in a rigged system that cheats its customers in every way that it can.

2. Cryptocurrencies are the objects of worship in a bizarre internet cult.

3. Cryptocurrencies are demonic.

While belief in cryptocurrencies is not similar to belief in QAnon in terms of what is actually believed, the psycho-geographic similarities of the two religions are immense. Both are ultra modern belief systems that could only have grown out of social media, using the power of the network to impel their adherents to believe increasingly incredible fantasies about the underlying mechanisms of political and economic power despite all available evidence. Acolytes of the cryptocurrency cult call themselves “HODLers” because they will “HODL” any asset given to them by someone who can pronounce “blockchain”. They will HODL this asset until no one is willing buy it from them even for a price as low as $0.000000000000000001. (One of the few advantages of cryptocurrencies is that they can actually trade at prices that low… but you do run out of decimal places eventually. Running out of decimal places is what finally put a bullet in the head of the Terra/Luna fiasco.)

Personally I call HODLers “financial suicide bombers”. It’s a more appropriate label given that their belief system calls on them to immolate not just their own financial futures, but also those of everyone around them.

The cryptocurrencies themselves (sometimes called “coins”) are just the mechanism the cryptocurrency cartel uses to extract capital from people who are gambling. The coins have no other purpose and are basically totally unimportant to this or any other story about cryptocurrencies. Coins come with names like Bitcoin, Ethereum, Avalanche, MagicalInternetMoney, Ripple, and Dogecoin. There are some 1,723 of these in circulation. Most of them are commonly known as “shitcoins.” There is sometimes truth in advertising.

I don’t think calling cryptocurrencies “demonic” is much of an overstatement. Cryptocurrencies are not currencies. There is some cryptography involved but there is also cryptography involved in sending your mother a text message on your iPhone. The places these cryptocurrencies are sold are not “markets”. They are gambling platforms that are preying on and destroying (mostly) young people’s lives financially and psychologically. Underhanded tactics are constantly deployed to get these young people to bet more in riskier ways. The businesses profit by financially and psychologically breaking the players. They cheat their customers with the numbers (as of last December, 90% (!) or more of listed trades are fake according to Nasdaq) and even more so they cheat them with psychological pressure tactics. And then there’s the billions of dollars lost to just outright theft.

I had read a lot of chatter on Reddit/Twitter about “the Bitcoin markets are manipulated this way” and I kind of wrote it off because all losing traders like to complain. But now that I’ve seen a little bit under the hood of what really goes on out there in the wasteland… “Demonic” is if anything an understatement. The financial instruments of mass destruction invented by this industry are incredible to behold. What, for instance, is Binance’s “perpetual future”? I’ll spare you the technical details and give you the real answer: it’s a tool created to allow the crypto cartel to bankrupt retail whenever they want without actually having to trade a single shitcoin. I can also assure you perpetual futures would not be allowed to trade on any exchange inside the legitimate financial system.

Stories like this are really just society’s first glimpse of the lumbering evil that has been growing and building strength like Grendel at the bottom of a sea of GPUs for years at this point. There’s still time to stop it but not much. This Grendel already devoured two United States Senators and it’s sure to devour a few more.

(from my other post about 3AC and BlockFi)

Let me interject that I only really consume media about how humanity is a train wreck. Documentaries about wars, manias, the mentally ill, financial fraud, serial killers, non-serial killers, prisons — that’s my jam. Which is to say I have a pretty high tolerance for Darkness. And yet when I took a dive into the world of cryptocurrencies, I felt like I was looking at a kind of darkness humanity hasn’t encountered before… a kind of amoral cyborg monstrosity, made out of computers and greed, rising from the internet, that was already well on its way to taking over the world by the time I really noticed it. Put in Manichean terms, I felt like I was looking at something incredibly evil.

The wildest part was that I was looking at this evil… by looking at a blockchain database on my computer screen.

I suspect once (if?) we manage as a species to snap out of this monster’s hypnotizing LED lights and throw its GPUs into the fires of the sun where they belong we will look back on a lot of this like a bad dream. A bad, shameful dream that everyone will claim they had seen through from the start. But that won’t have been the reality I saw. The people building this monster are being praised as geniuses in glossy magazine spreads. They’re on TV, giving opinions about things to thousands and thousands of journalists whose sycophancy is only matched by their stupidity. Technology journalists are supposed to protect you from these kind of people. This time, they have decided that the quickest way to make a buck is to egg them on.

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Changpeng Zhao (Binance), Sam Bankman-Fried (FTX), Giancarlo Devasini (Tether), [redacted for fear of SLAPP], [redacted for fear of SLAPP] — these are not the same kind of people as Steve Jobs and Bill Gates. Jobs and Gates ruthlessly crushed their competition, stole innovations, avoided taxes, you name it. They did some bad stuff. But in the end they wanted to build a company and deliver you a vision. The cryptocurrency murderer’s row I just mentioned however — they just want your money and they will fuck you any which way they can to get it. Steal from you, manipulate you with rigged games you can’t win, dump shitcoins with a value proposition significantly lower than $0 on you at exorbitant prices so that they can cash out while you take incredible losses — these are not the side effects of their business models. These are their business models.

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PRELUDE

About a month ago I stumbled on Zeke Faux’s October 2021 exposé on this cryptocurrency called Tether in Bloomberg. Beyond being shocked that there are actually journalists with at least a shred of integrity and intelligence in the technology sector, I was quite taken with the saga of Tether. Tether is almost certainly the largest and most successful financial fraud in the history of the human race and they are very much still in business, but Tether is not what this article is about, so go read Mr. Faux’s reporting if you want to learn about it. But the story did cause me start to look deeper into the world of cryptocurrencies and how it had evolved since I last looked around, ca. 2018.

Being at least proximal to tech, I had been aware of “crypto” since that time someone bought a pizza with Bitcoins now worth $200M. I thought it was just a faddish version of the classic “Greater Fool” scam. You, a fool, buy a thing purely because you think you’ll be able to find a greater fool in the future who will pay you more for it. Of course cryptocurrencies had the unique property of being the first greater fool scam where there isn’t actually a physical “thing”, but otherwise I thought they were more like Beanie Babies than like the spawn of Satan. Heck eight years ago cryptocurrencies seemed to have legitimate utility: you could use them to buy drugs on the internet. (The one cryptocurrency with actual utility, Monero, will always have value for exactly this reason.)

Some of the Tether executive team. I have a lot to say about Tether here.

This time when I started to look around the industry things felt… different. It seemed like everything I looked at was a scam of some kind or other. Bullshit companies that offered no goods or services of any utility but instead proferred piles and piles of digital “tokens” (henceforth to be interchangeably labeled “magic beans”). Companies that ripped off their customers. Crypto “funds” offering simply incredibly rates of “risk free return” as high as 30% APY. Companies that produced nothing, not even “tokens”, but managed to raise billions talking about solving some problem that has already been solved quite well for centuries, but this time with “the blockchain.” None of the people who made those kind of claims seemed to understand either the problem or the blockchain. The more I looked the more appalled I became — it seemed to be a circus of grifters, frauds, and charlatans all the way down.

But I happened to start looking around the industry at a fortuitous time. The entire landscape of “crypto” seemed to be on the verge of a collapse that would look identical in most respects to the collapse of all the scams, frauds, and manias people had used to defraud each other in the past. Eventually things seemed so shaky and ready to explode that I decided to sketch out a step by step playbook of what I expected this collapse would look like based on what I knew about the gigantic frauds and grifts of centuries past. Here is a streamlined version¹¹ of what I wrote:

1. Cryptocurrency prices will start to fall

2. Crypto asset values will reflect a “flight to quality.” the crypto assets regarded as worthless will drop faster than those regarded as valuable.

3. At least some of the whales (ultra high net worth individuals who own a lot of cryptocurrencies) will collude to prop up the prices.

4. Some kind of cryptocurrency institution will collapse and/or refuse to give people back their cryptocurrency and/or actual money, setting off a bank run on itself and possible contamination to other businesses.

5. Another, slightly larger cryptocurrency institution will follow, possibly quickly but just as easily not until many days later.

6. At that point it will become like a semi-random game of dominoes as institutions implode.
   
   [ed. note (2024): now that Tether’s banker is choosing who will enforce America’s laws and the bros are planning to have the industry bailed out with hundreds of billions of dollars of taxpayer money the steps after this one may never come to pass]
   

7. At some point Tether will stop turning tethers into dollars. you don’t need to know how Tether works to understand this story but you do need to know that Tethers are imaginary things in your computer worth $1 that you can use to turn real dollars into cryptocurrencies and, theoretically at least, turn cryptocurrencies into dollars. That second direction usually proves a bit harder because tethers are worth literally nothing, but that’s outside of the scope of this article. Given that Tether is in the running for the largest financial fraud in the history of our great species the collapse of Tether will create total market chaos. You can’t blow a $60–70B hole in a $1.3T market and expect that market to survive. But it’s even worse than that, because 70% of all crypto trades are done with imaginary tether’s that have no actual value, they only have the perceived value of $1. When Tether blows up liquidity will go to 0 and prices for every single coin will collapse to almost nothing.

8. The whales will be caught in a situation where they hold billions in notional cryptocurrency value but there will be a significantly lower amount of actual fiat currency with which they can buy houses and “lambos” (crypto people like pretty much everything that is tasteless and expensive but they have a real thing for lamborghinis). At some point one of the whales will see that whoever gets out of the burning building that is the crypto cartel first will get to keep the most money. He (trust me on the pronoun) will grab whatever money he can and run for it.

9. The other whales will turn on each other in a desperate attempt to retain the right to be called a “billionaire” and not a “prisoner”, but the financial exit windows will be shrinking every minute.

10. (Much later) Everyone involved will be arrested for an absolutely extraordinary amount of felonies.

11. No one who lost money will ever get it back.

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THE GAME

Below is a “trading” view for Bitcoin, the oldest and least preposterously named cryptocurrency. It spans the past 30 days on Binance, the biggest and only 2nd most corrupt cryptocurrency “exchange”. Each cryptocurrency “exchange” is controlled by a whale and the whale who owns Binance is a man who chooses to go by the appropriately cryptographic handle of CZ (full name: Changpeng Zhao). Sam Bankman-Fried, (AKA “SBF” - these guys love anonymity) whom Fortune magazine and the New York Times seem to regard as some kind of legitimate businessman even though he came right out and told Bloomberg reporter Matt Levine that he was running one of the biggest Ponzi schemes of all time, runs a “separate” “exchange” called “FTX”. The doubled double quotes are indeed awkward but FTX is neither fully separate from Binance — they all seem to work together as a kind of demonic digital cartel — nor is it an actual exchange. These are “exchanges” in name only. Nothing of value is exchanged in them. What they really are is totally unregulated gambling parlors where the vultures of humanity enslave legions of (mostly) men into giant Ponzi shaped formations and suck incredible amounts of money out of them by addicting them to a game that is rigged in ways that would make mobsters in 1960s Las Vegas deeply ashamed. If Goldman Sachs is a vampire squid, crypto exchanges are a blood drinking succubus straight from hell.

You may have noticed that the young men bearing bar charts who are solving the world’s problems with these magic blockchains seem to be much, much, much wealthier than even the wealthiest of mobsters. This is not an accident.

The game of buying and selling Bitcoin or any other coin involves a line that goes up and down. Sometimes it goes up, sometimes it goes down. Sometimes this line is decorated with red and green bars called “candles” and sometimes it is decorated with more lines and occasionally even with triangles or circles. You can bet on the line going up or down. It doesn’t really matter. Because as you play this game a battery of cheating, psychological abuse, and deception will be unleashed upon you to ensure that you will almost always end up losing. The game looks like you might expect a stock market or similar locus of exchange of value might look — there are things that look like order books, things that look like clearing transactions, and all the bells and whistles associated with that sort of activity. But Nasdaq estimated that more than 90% of the numbers you see on these screens that resemble stock trading are made up out of thin air as recently as December 2021. And not made up at random. They are put there to send the fear of losing money down the back of your neck, to show you possibilities, ask you to 2x, 10x, even 100x your bets! And then ram poverty right back down your fucking throat.

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The chart above shows you a full month of price data for Bitcoin as traded on Binance. Dates are on the horizontal axis and dollar values are on the vertical axis. Perhaps you may notice that the price seems, shall we say, remarkably stable for a thing that is supposed to go up and down in value in order to enable you to gamble upon the change in that “value”. If you have studied economics, I apologize; that must have been rough. But if you did, you may know that that a price chart like this tells you pretty clearly the actual market price wants to be.. somewhere below where it is, and yet something is keeping the price locked at or around $30,000 all the way from May 10th to June 8th.

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THE COURSE OF EVENTS DURING THE CRYPTOCALYPSE

1. May 10th: Cryptocurrencies called Terra and Luna (cryptomaniacs have a thing for moons) completely collapse in the course of a few days. This is the first time that young men who don’t actually understand mathematics but look like they might manage to make a notional $18 billion dollars of regular people’s money just… disappear. Do Kwon, the whale who invented the scheme that was supposed to make Terra always worth $1 and Luna worth whatever a bunch of morons wanted to pay for it, spent a lot of time on Twitter telling people who didn’t believe in his algorithm to “have fun staying poor” while the project was in development, proving that it’s very hard to invent villains as reprehensible as actual real life crypto whales. After the collapse it was discovered that Do “Have Fun Staying Poor” Kwon had been siphoning money out of the system at the recently reported rate of $80M/month. He is still somehow not even in jail as of writing (June 14th). Patrick Boyle, a finance professor at King’s College London, made an excellent Youtube going into the particulars of why Terra/Luna was doomed from the word “go” if you want to know more about this disaster.

2. The Terra/Luna collapse brings panic in all the cryptocurrency markets. Bitcoin whales seem to collude to stabilize the price of Bitcoin, because it stabilizes in a hurry and stays stable until…

3. June 10th: The stock market has a bad day. So do cryptocurrencies.

4. June 11th: Cryptocurrency prices have a very bad day. The stock market is closed for Saturday.

5. June 12th: Cryptocurrency prices have a really bad day. Cryptocurrency lender Celsius, an institution that pretends to be a bank but is in actuality a real life den of thieves (at least one member of the C suite was arrested last November), suffers a run, closes its doors, and refuses to give back its depositors cryptocurrency. These thieves claim the contract its customers signed apparently allows this. No one knows how much money is in Celsius, but it’s in the billions, and it is comprised of the savings of many thousands of families from all around the world.

As I write this it is June 14th, 2022 and Celsius has indicated no intention of ever returning any depositor [ed. note: one of the depositors dumb enough to trust Celsius with their money was just nominated by Trump to run the entire American military. For bonus points he’s in an apocalyptic Christian cult]. Quite the contrary, you see them on WhaleAlert using the blockchain to send that depositor crypto all over the world in chunks of hundreds of millions of dollars. You can probably go watch it happen right now. Just reload every few minutes. The blockchain is… very slow.

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This is what crypto bros do to people. Hundreds of thousands of them. And this monster is still growing. People think I’m being a little nuts when I tell them cryptocurrencies are demonic but I’m not sure how you could look at those tweets and think they are anything else.

Running off with billions of dollars of Americans’ household savings is generally frowned upon and is one of those rare sins that does almost 100% of the time bring the attention of the government. It is probably safe to assume that soon that the eyes of Attorneys General all over the land are turning towards cryptocurrencies, but so far… nothing. Lots of those attorneys general are probably “invested” in cryptocurrency, just like no less than 10%¹² of the country, so it will take a while for them to wake up. But when they do wake up, they will be feeling poorer and like they were taken for a ride by some boys bearing blockchains… and they will seek vengeance.

At this point in the story (meaning, as I write) the formerly easy and carefree life of a billionaire crypto whale starts to become considerably more stressful. Not only is the bitcoin market fucked from FUD, the feds are suddenly paying a lot of attention. And not just the American feds. The Korean and Japanese feds are glancing in your direction.

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1. If this last part doesn’t impress you you may need to read up on what exactly Americans’ tax dollars get spent on.

2. For the nerds: my conclusion was that increasing the block size was obviously an infinitely better solution than “segregated witness” which struck me as a kind of insane hack. The fact that the worse engineering solution won out through sheer force of will of hucksterism says a lot about the cryptocurrency’s constant refrains of “innovation” (and also explains why a lot of the more serious engineers and privacy advocates split off into the Bitcoin Cash community).

3. Literally zero of the people I know with degrees from the fanciest universities in things like computer science, mathematics, and economics ever bought any bitcoins. As I have one of those degrees myself the number of those people in my social circle is actually quite large.

4. Some crimes are moral (e.g. exfiltrating capital from a corrupt and tyrannical government, buying drugs on the internet) but most of them aren’t.

5. If you haven’t read Mackay’s book you should. Not only is it an easy read (the chapters are short and self contained, each one about a different historical mania), few things have convinced me that very little has changed about human nature over the last two centuries as well as that book. The fact that Mackay himself lost all his money when he got caught up in what is still the greatest bubble of all time is the icing on the cake.

6. See also: multi-level marketing companies.

7. FKA “Twitter”, currently AKA “X”, AKA “Global Authoritarianism’s Pravda”.

8. This was the era that brought us the first wave of crypto bros.

9. Well before I even really understood what was going on at FTX which is still something almost completely misunderstood by the entirety of the media outside of a handful of reporters at London’s Financial Times.

10. Medium’s insistence on putting content I wanted to let people read for free behind a paywall is why I moved to Substack after just a few posts.

11. The original is here on reddit, but I warn you, you need to speak crypto gibberish to read it.

12. This was 23% in the original essay when I still believed some of the public relations numbers put out by the industry. We have better numbers now. According to the Federal Reserve ~10% of Americans were holding crypto in 2022. As of 2024 the number is ~7%. Less than 1% have ever used crypto for anything other than speculation. Meanwhile the official party line of the crypto industry is that 50 million or more americans use crypto.